In the field of testing and managing wireless services, and in particular testing and developing software therefor, it has been required to provide access to a wireless network. Such access requires the deployment and use of wireless access devices such as wireless modems. However, this presents problems when developing and testing software such as network testing and management software. One problem has been that the use of a wireless network or service provided by a commercial service provider is expensive and the behavior of the network or devices for connecting thereto is generally nondeterministic. That is, it is difficult to predict a wireless response at any given time. However, development and testing often requires deterministic control of test conditions. Furthermore, some conditions or network device responses may not be ordinarily available, for example, rare or unusual error conditions. This makes testing of a program's response to such conditions difficult.
Another problem has been that wireless services may not be readily available when development and testing software for the same. For example, some services may only be physically available in Europe or other geographic regions. This can make it difficult to develop and test software for these networks or services from distant locations or regions such as the United States. It may be necessary to deploy hardware or personnel at remote locations to facilitate testing and development. A wireless network service may be in the process of being deployed, making it difficult to develop and test software for use with the same. Furthermore, the cost of network access devices such as wireless modems makes it prohibitively expensive to test and develop software for conditions where a large number of network access devices are available.
There is a need to enable testing and development of software that uses a wireless network or service without requiring physical access to the wireless network and without requiring actual communication with wireless modems. There is also a need to allow software developers to control test conditions of wireless modems. There is also a need to test network applications under the condition of large numbers of network access devices such as wireless modems.